Current electronic distribution of television messages, such as commercials, from an originator or distributor to one or more television broadcast stations and/or cable television master control centers, does not easily allow for regional customization of such messages. The reason for this is that each different variant of a message has to be transmitted completely by itself, and independent from the other variants, from sender to receiver. Each extra variant will thus require proportionally extra bandwidth usage over the transmission channel. Sending fifty different variants will require fifty times as much bandwidth as sending one single variant. This added bandwidth consumption would be prohibitively costly and/or time consuming.
Regional customization of television messages would be desirable, for example, in the distribution of infomercials. An infomercial is a television commercial with the specific purpose of getting the viewer to pickup the phone and order the advertised product immediately. Typically, there are two types of infomercials: Long form messages (paid programming), having a length of (approx.) 30 minutes, and short form messages (direct response ads, aired in the space of normal commercials), having a length of 30-120 sec.
A typical infomercial (just like any other television commercial) is broadcast in many different geographic regions from many different (easily 50 or more) broadcast stations. To measure the effectiveness of the commercial in the different regions it would be advantageous to have a different call-in phone number in use for the commercial in each region. Typically, such phone numbers to be called by the viewer are overlaid over a small portion, typically the bottom, of the video for the entire duration (or large portions) of the commercial.
Regional customization of television messages would also be advantageous, for instance, in the case of a commercial for a brand or chain that has many stores throughout the country. Commercials for the brand could be regionalized by showing the address of the nearest store for that brand, by showing different promotions for different products for each region, by showing different prices for the same product in different regions, etc. Such region-specific customizations could be added to small portions of the video of the commercial, for example as (but not limited to) a text overlay.
The above examples have in common that a small portion of the video is varying between the different versions of the message, while larger portions of the video are common between many versions. Therefore it would be advantageous if there was a method to independently encode and distribute different portions of the screen, to exploit the different amounts of variation for different portions of the screen, and thus achieve a saving in required transmission bandwidth. An additional advantage would be reduced encoding and decoding time since the amount of video to be encoded and decoded would be less.
However, television commercials are currently mainly distributed in MPEG-2 format. Unfortunately, the MPEG-2 video compression standard as well as existing MPEG-2 encoding and decoding equipment do not allow for independent encoding, decoding, and/or assembly into full screen video, of different portions of the video screen.